JD Heyes

3-6-18

Social media giants Google and Facebook, which together soak up nearly 80 percent of all online ad revenue, have declared war on conservative media and conservative figures.

Recent changes in the companies’ algorithms that allegedly were made to ‘weed out’ fake news instead have been weaponized to weed out independent media and right-leaning voices that don’t comport with the Marxist Left ideology of the sites’ owners.

Some sites and conservatives that have Facebook pages have seen their traffic drop anywhere from 75 percent to 95 percent.

Ordinarily, that’d be just fine — unfair but fine given that as private companies, they can run their businesses as they see fit.

But there’s more to it than that. There’s a legal aspect as well.

Many of these sites pay Facebook and Google to market themselves so as to increase reach and boost exposure and revenue (The National Sentinel, where I serve as editor-in-chief, no longer does this since our site has been shadow-banned by Facebook beginning in February).

They, too, have seen their traffic from Facebook fall off dramatically as well, even as Facebook takes their money. That’s criminal; in fact, that is the true definition of a bait-and-switch scam.

Young Cons: This very popular conservative news site had millions of daily readers during the recent election, and the site received nearly all its traffic from Facebook (Lesson: Never put all your marketing eggs in one basket). Facebook has been increasingly censoring Young Cons stories since 2016; now the site struggles mightily and regularly switches domains in order to maintain traffic.

SaraPalin.com: At one point the former GOP VP nominee and Alaska governor’s website was serving up stories to her four million Facebook followers, but she, too, had to begin switching domains in order to maintain traffic.

Right Wing News: This site grew to massive proportions over the past few years, in large part thanks to its meteoric popularity on Facebook. During one week in 2015, the site’s Facebook page reached 133 million people. The site was driving about the same amount of web traffic as some of the biggest newspapers in the U.S. But since 2016 Facebook began blocking traffic to the site; its owner, John Hawkins, announced he would shut it down in January (it’s still online but the content is not regularly updated).

Independent Journal Review: This, too, was a large conservative news and information source, but because it was overly reliant on Facebook traffic, the site had to terminate a number of its employees last week, leaving the fate of the Millennial-focused site in doubt.

The site I edit, The National Sentinel, was getting decent traffic from our Facebook page from our more than 27,000 followers, but that has largely dried up thanks to the true Fascists at Facebook. But our business model doesn’t rely significantly on Facebook, so there’s that (here’s how you can support us — for free!).

Some have called for regulation of the social media giants. I disagree. It’s time for indie publishers, conservative investors and freedom-minded tech firms to band together and form their own social media companies focused on true free speech and liberty before conservative speech is actually criminalized on these other platforms.

My guess is they will become popular enough to not simply drain a massive amount of ad revenue from Facebook and Google, but might even cause one or both to collapse as freedom lovers abandon them in droves and bring their followers with them.